Department of Politics and the Exeter Q-Step Centre, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK.
Department of Political Science, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland.
Sci Rep. 2021 Nov 16;11(1):22320. doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-01714-4.
A growing body of scholarship investigates the role of misinformation in shaping the debate on climate change. Our research builds on and extends this literature by (1) developing and validating a comprehensive taxonomy of climate contrarianism, (2) conducting the largest content analysis to date on contrarian claims, (3) developing a computational model to accurately classify specific claims, and (4) drawing on an extensive corpus from conservative think-tank (CTTs) websites and contrarian blogs to construct a detailed history of claims over the past 20 years. Our study finds that the claims utilized by CTTs and contrarian blogs have focused on attacking the integrity of climate science and scientists and, increasingly, has challenged climate policy and renewable energy. We further demonstrate the utility of our approach by exploring the influence of corporate and foundation funding on the production and dissemination of specific contrarian claims.
越来越多的学术研究探讨了错误信息在塑造气候变化辩论中的作用。我们的研究通过以下方式构建在这一文献的基础上并加以扩展：（1）开发和验证综合的气候变化怀疑论分类法，（2）对怀疑论主张进行迄今为止最大规模的内容分析，（3）开发一种计算模型以准确分类特定主张，以及（4）借鉴保守派智库（CTT）网站和怀疑论博客上的大量语料库来构建过去 20 年的主张详细历史。我们的研究发现，CTTs 和怀疑论博客使用的主张侧重于攻击气候科学和科学家的诚信，并且越来越多地对气候政策和可再生能源提出了挑战。我们通过探索企业和基金会资金对特定怀疑论主张的产生和传播的影响，进一步展示了我们方法的实用性。
